Fairytales Retold

Hello Beautiful Thinkers,

I have no doubt that you’ve noticed a recent trend of revisiting fairy tales. Just off the top of my head I can name the television shows Once Upon A Time, Grimm, and Beauty and the Beast. And let’s not forget these movies: Beastly, Mirror Mirror, Snow White and the Huntsman, Jack the Giant Slayer, Oz the Great and Powerful, and Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, and that’s just within the last few years. It seems like everyone and their mother is falling over themselves to retell a fairytale.

Of course they don’t just tell the story over; each of these movies and shows is bringing in a twist of their own to freshen up these old stories. The most common of these twists seems to be making our childhood stories into action movies. Writers are turning damsels in distress into warriors against evil. Snow White is kicking ass in all of her new incarnations, and from the previews it would seem Hansel and Gretel went from simply pushing the witch into her own oven to an all-out war, hunting witches down with all kinds of creative weapons.

All of these remakes got me thinking: the trend probably isn’t exclusive to the film world. It wasn’t long before I found Peter Cashorali’s Fairy Tales: Traditional Stories Retold for Gay Men. I was instantly interested to see how different the stories would be when told as same-sex romances. Not the action packed modernizations that are seen in films now, it appears Cashorali’s goal was to keep the stories as close to the original as possible. Even the language he uses when retelling the stories gives them the feeling of a classic fairy tale.

In the collection I found some of the more popular stories like Beauty and the Beast, Rumpelstiltskin, and The Ugly Duckling. But there were more than just the typical Disney classics: the collection also included less popular stories like The Fisherman and His Lover (originally The Fisherman and His Wife) and Godfather Death. In these retellings, gay men have the chance to see aspects of life that specifically concern them, like coming out, coping with the end of their club days, grieving, AIDS, and the most important lesson, to chase love. Peter Cashorali’s stories remind us that love is love, no matter who shares it. And with the amount of hate in the world today this is something we can all stand to be reminded of from time to time.

Whether you’re a gay man looking for a fairy tale character you can relate to, or you’re just a fairy tale fanatic, this is a charming collection of classic stories reworked for a contemporary audience.